Business Plan Archive

Let us all learn from our mistakes. The University of Maryland?s Robert H. Smith School of Business with help from Webmergers.com have launched the Business Plan Archive website. This website is currently in the process of collecting documents from dotcom startups and it will soon make these available online so that future entrepreneurs and researchers can learn from the past successes and failures. So if you were ever associated with dotcom boom, head over to this site and help build this unique archive.

I almost missed this interesting news story about software bugs. Software bugs cause US economy about $59.5 billion a year. Another revelation from this article is that better testing could expose the bugs and remove bugs at the early development stage could reduce about $22.2 billion of the cost. Now that's some news. A must show to all the managers who want to reduce the development time at the cost of testing.

Community Computing

This month's Software Development Magazine's newsletter (DevTalk) talks about Simputer. For those who don't know what it is, Simputer(Simple, Inexpensive, Mobile Computer) is a handheld device which has been designed by students and professors from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bangalore, and engineers from the Bangalore-based design company Encore Software Ltd. The Simputer runs on Linux and packs 32 MG of RAM and 16 MG of Flash memory. At about $200, Simputer is costly for most indians, rural or otherwise. But with its smart-card reader, Simputer extends access from the community to the individual: For the cost of a card (a proposed $1-2) and a nominal rental fee, each villager can buy a smart card that stores all his or her information, and allows Internet and e-mail access. I could not find a online link to the story but keep watching this space for it to appear.

Get out more - Travel the world, virtually. This news article provides few very good links to virtual libraries, tours, documentaries etc.

Microsoft, IBM offer WS-Security spec to OASIS - "Microsoft, IBM, and VeriSign have submitted WS-Security, a group of Web services security specs first announced last April, to the OASIS standards group. The growing list of all-star players that have already agreed to serve on the OASIS technical committee includes BEA, Cisco, Intel, Iona, Novell, RSA, SAP, and--drum roll, please--Sun Microsystems." - One thing I also noticed about this submission was that it was offered to OASIS and not W3C.

On a related note, Learn about the various existing and upcoming XML security standards.

The New Don Box Home Page [via Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]

Well, We are placed sixth on google when you search for Elephant's Toes. Cool. This might change though with people still blogging about it. I guess another rule to The Google Challenge should be that, you are allowed to blog only once on the keyword and that's it, no more blogs using that keyword atleast for that week. There are some very amusing posts, though. Read it all by searching Google for elephant's toes.

The Glass Engine [via John Patrick's Weblog] - One of the most amazing use of technology I have seen recently. It allows you to navigate through Philip Glass's works based on few parameters like sorrow, joy, intensity, density etc. The Glass Engine is an IBM research project to enable deep navigation of more than 60 of the composer's works.

WildLife fact of the day - Elephant's Toes

According to Hindu mythology, the world is supported on eight pairs of elephants, called lokpalas. These "lokpalas" are said to have been created by the Hindu God, Brahma, out of the cosmic egg at the beginning of creation. Guarding and holding up the Earth as they are, elephants are now believed to be guardians. Well that was mythology, now for the fact. The elephants are large in size and guess what helps to balance it's own load, It's their toes. Behind elephant's toes is a large pad, called tippy toes which cushion their steps. An Asian elephant has five toes on the front of the feet and and four on the back. This distinguishes it among other things from African elephant, which has only four toes on the front feet and three on the back.

Mark Pilgrim is running a series of stories titled "30 days to a more accessible weblog". Here he tries to answer few questions on how to make your site (although he mentions weblogs, but I feel that these stories applies to any website) more accessible to people with disabilities. Till now he has presented five stories with five different protagonists, We've had Marcus and Jackie who are blind, Bill who is not able to use Mouse and relies on Keyboard for navigating between links, Michael who is colorblind (he can only see shades of grey) and Lillian, an immigrant who does not have administrative access to her machine and does not understand why CNN.com web site cannot be made larger.

Look Ma, Not even a single table.

We've removed the last table that was holding the Site Logo. Now we've a pure tableless layout throughout the site. There have been a lot of discussion about using tables vs CSS based tableless layouts. Here are few links that will clear some confusion:

Tables or CSS: Choosing a layout by Craig Saila.
Why avoiding tables (for layout) is important by Dave Polaschek

For us the reason to make this transition was to make this site more accessible, more usable.
Also, the site now validates as HTML 4.0 Transitional and CSS. Another step closer to more accessible design.

We are taking part in The Google Challenge. It's a cool idea and rather simple. "Each week the staff will decide on a "keyword" for the week, this will happen on every Thursday. The keyword will be posted on the frontpage of this site. Then all particpants of the challenge will get an email* notifing them of the keyword and other general site update information. Then the blogger will write an entry in their blog having to do with that subject. Then a week later the staff will search Google for "keywords" with the mature filer ON. We will go through Google until we find the top 5 bloggers. They will be listed on the frontpage. We do not have any funding so no cash prizes will be awarded. This is all in fun."

Somehow this went out of my radar. Digital Web published an interview with Eric Meyer (CSS Guru), some days back. In the interview Eric answers questions on CSS Standards,CSS Positioning, Netscape and other very relevant topics. While I am here, Eric has a CSS Experiments section on his website. Here you can view some really cool CSS stuff with the latest being, pure CSS menus demo which he uploaded this morning.

What Do You Want to Patch Today? - More bugs in IE, SQL Server, More possibilities for hackers, More patches for you and me to download and install. The cycle never ends.

Sweet Sweep...Lakers Threepeat

Once again, Lakers are the Champions.

Web Services to aid DOS attacks

Atlast I know what REST stands for. Now to the next part, why so much excitement and confusion over it.

Check out Paul Prescod's (the man in the midst of most of the conversations centering on REST) home page for more details on REST.

This is the social network killer app. [David Watson]

Defining Web Services using WSDL

Yeah, that's the title of our first article. The article provides the anatomy of a WSDL document and closely examines the components of WSDL with the help of a sample web service written using SOAP Toolkit 2.0 and Visual Basic 6. Go, Check it out and let us know what you think of it.

W3C weighs in on Web services.